Do you read interviews? I could argue successfully that publishing interviews can go either way in terms of interest.

Two ingredients to a good conversation are a subject that has done interesting things, and has an intriguing point of view, and a set of questions that demonstrate the interviewer is interested in exploring some of those projects and has a certain point of view.

There are other characteristics that can make an interview pop. Preparation about the subject matter and the person on the part of the interviewer, a certain degree of curiosity, and creativity. There's a time and place for open questions, and one for more specific ones.

The whole experience of reading feels (almost) like being there, watching the people while they're having this conversation.

That question set in motion an exploration of Dylan's creative process. There is as much information in what is not said there, than in the answers. It is revealing of the personality and thought process without ascribing a specific formula to it.

Art should be where people hang out, to be enjoyed by as many people as possible. We'll get back to this concept.

Do you think that’s a danger in teaching writing – formulaic scripts?

This is from an interview with Francis Ford Coppola [hat tip Robin Sloan] where the director, producer, and screenwriter reveals tidbits through which we discover the artist. Anisse Gross says the conversation went on for five hours, and over dinner.

Gross was impressed by how humble and open Coppola was throughout.

The answer to the question in the subhead gives us some white space to play with:

Dramatic structure and theater plays are thousands of years old. It’s amazing how much dramatic structure is influenced by the Greeks. The novel’s only a few hundreds of years old, but in the novel there’s still so much room for invention.

And later he guides us with: A movie is like writing a haiku. About the Web:

The only thing about the Internet is that the decorum and the politeness really hasn’t been worked out yet. You can say anything you want and there’s no accountability. I’d like a little bit of politeness. To be a human being.

The character of the person behind the artist comes across clearly. The whole interview is a joy to read, do it leaning forward with anticipation. You may find the better question to how to make do with where you are in your work, business, or life.

If you could go back and do one thing differently, would you and if so, what would it be?

A couple of days ago I came across a very engaging interview with Seth Godin. This is a person I have been reading for a dozen years, ever since I found his work through Fast Company. It gives me a soft giggle when people send me his posts to read.

I even spent a day with Seth along with my boss and colleague a few years back.

He's been mixing things up more lately, and I like that. In fact, his getting more personal in the answers is the reason why I liked this third interview as a good example for this post. It's a case of demonstrating the content with the container -- how he operates by way of how he answers.

They choose people based upon inspiration, similarly to how I go about making selections for Conversation Agent. The interview is presented beautifully on a page that may look like a stream lined with accomplishments as you scroll down.

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Asking good questions is an art. One that can be learned with practice. Because good questions reveal as much about the person asking them -- their story and intent -- as it does about the intended recipient of the question.

Revealing yourself to others is an important part of the process we call "building relationships," from which we build credibility, trust and loyalty. I wrote that more than four years ago here. I'm particularly proud of closing the gap on the jobs I'd like to have in the last four years.

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The why of asking good question is that we need to learn to write and design to the way things are. Change is part of life, and thus business. The way we respond to change is where we should focus, not so much the "it" itself.

Several more examples of whyclosing the gap on promises with meaningful actions (for brands) matters bubbled up online just this past week.

When something different happens to you -- either in a personal situation, like a car accident, or at work, like a series of mishaps or a disconnect -- you generally step out of auto pilot.

Even if you prepare and train for unusual situations, it's nearly impossible to anticipate the nature of what could happen next.

Life is unpredictable, and not necessarily just in a bad way. We may not have control over what happens, we do control how we respond to it.

Corporations are not people

They are made of people, though.

A couple of days ago, Seth Godin wrote about Matt Fisher's story about the tragic death of his sister and the response of her insurance company. I worked for many years in the financial services and risk management business, so I have a bit of an idea of internal processes, due diligence, etc.

It's easy to get distracted by how the businesses handles things internally -- how it makes decisions, who needs to be involved, and so on. Thousands of micro decisions and actions go into running an organization every day.

How things happen can give you a competitive edge, being mindful that your biggest competition is the attitude and energy you apply to how you run your business. Why?

Because at the end of the day, your ability to engage in profitable commerce depends on one simple test: how do you close the gap between the promises you make and those you keep? Godin says:

If Progressive is proud of their tactics, they should say so. "We fight against claims to keep our costs low, saving you money." But if they're not proud, they should tell the truth, learn from it and apologize.

Corporations are mechanisms through which we can deliver promises collectively. It comes down to where the organization's focus is -- the act of keeping promises allows the organization to make better ones. Make no mistake: marketing messages are (also) promises.

Fixing corporations

In many respects, the corporation has been taken hostage. It is squarely in the middle of two (main) sets of promises that are at odds with each other. Today, it's choosing to put the shareholder front and center.

It's worth reposting United's statement, because many of us in the course of our jobs are called to choose every single day how we do what we do. And it is really up to us to make a difference, including believing we can:

“We reached out directly to the Klebahns to apologize and we are reviewing this matter. What the Klebahns describe is not the service we aim to deliver to our customers. We are redepositing the miles used to purchase the ticket back into Mr. Klebahn’s account in addition to refunding the unaccompanied minor charge. We certainly appreciate their business and would like the opportunity to provide them a better travel experience in the future.“

Charles Hobart/United Airlines Spokesman

How many people trade under the United brand or with the corporation?

Combined with the fact that in many instances there is little choice as to which airline you're going to use for a variety of reasons -- only direct flight to destination, merger with Continental, etc. -- I am sincerely in the "what can be done to save them from themselves" camp as well.

Honesty works best in real time

Say you're Air France and need to make an unscheduled stop to fill your tank and can only use cash to do it. This actually happened.

"Air France confirms that it asked passengers if they had cash, as payments for fuel can only be made in cash in Damascus. Ultimately, Air France could pay the full amount itself, and passengers did not have to advance any cash. Air France apologizes to its customers for the inconvenience."

Bhargava makes a good point, honesty works best in real time. Why not tell the truth?

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Conversation is a fundamental part of commerce. Commerce is a good construct to upload humanism. Because meaning must be negotiated and we constantly need feedback to see how we're doing.

Which is why I stepped up to the plate and proposed we make this topic part of the agenda at SxSW.

Conversations across sites are one of the things I miss about the early days of publishing.

We used to start a topic in one blog and move across several (sometimes) discussing its merits and different angles. It was fun.

These days there's a lot of chatter on many networks, yet very few true conversation agents. You recognize them because they hit a nerve on a timely topic by advancing our thinking about it. Which in turn inspires others to look into it.

Then there is another way to have been there, understanding where next, and implementing to get there with your business.

In my experience, it often involves simplifying a concept so that looking back it seems obvious, yet you had to go through the process to get there, because it didn't exist in that form.

The other story that rounds up our weekend links is an onion, and it won't make you cry. In fact, probably just the opposite.

Ready?

On Streams, Pages, Business Models, and Tor

The three stories that caught my eye this week are:

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He is a master at capturing the conversation around topics. Anil Dash often publishes links and additional commentary to subjects he writes about. He did that this week on the Streams vs. Pages discussion:

What about permalinks?! I love permalinks, and the more geeky sort were worried about what happens to permalinks in an all-stream world. The way I see it, there are two possible evolutions to the permalink: They can either be a link to a particular point of information within a stream, or (more interestingly) they can be a link to a representation of how a stream looked at a particular moment in the past.

That is a good thought on permalinks as doors rather than gates. Since there is no link to a source, I assume this is Dash's.

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When something is not working, don't do more of it. Do something else. Jason Goldberg went that route with Fab.com and thrived. You can't iterate yourself to a business model, he said at the 99 percent conference (link is to a video). A couple of quotes from the talk:

The company (Fab.com) launched in June of 011. They grew from half million year end to four million in four months. 4 million members (50% of which coming to the site from social sharing) is not an eCommerce site. That's a movement.

You can't make that stuff happen even if you try.

It happens by keeping things authentic and real. By staying true to your principles of design and following the users.

[it amounts to] do we have an emotional experience with the customer that is going to make them want to come back the next day, and the one after that? To see what Fab.com is going to do next.

He then proceeds to talk about how they decided to scrap the original company. The idea was: if you can't figure out something in a year, just throw it away and do something else. So they did.

Focus on one thing that the market hungers for (and you're passionate about), and something you can be the best at reminded me of Jim Collins' three circles. Will this design make the customer smile?

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What is a Tor? You may ask. Dan Schultz tells us all about a Tor of the dark Web, making good use of humor in the process:

Tor is a program that makes you anonymous. This means that, for better or for worse, the big brothers, neighborhood hackers, and ad agencies of the world can’t tell what you are doing on the Internet without going through a lot of effort and expense.

Is that too abstract? Here are some illustrative statements. *Taps the microphone*

A Tor user walks into a bar, the bartender says “who are you?”

How many Tor users does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only a few, but you’ll never know who did it.

I used Tor last night and now my wife says that she doesn’t even know who I am any more.

I’ll be here all night.

If you're not laughing at this, I can't help you.

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There is still plenty of opportunity untapped by digital media and social technologies. Yet, I hope we don't forget that making actual things is part of what life is made of. When I hear people talk about creating jobs and focusing solely on technology in the programming sense, I cringe.

We need to remember how to make things again -- this time better, so we can make better promises to future generations.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

I often share good resources I come across and use and links to learning opportunities on the Conversation Agent Facebook page.

So if you're into that, you may want to like that page to stay in the loop.

Sharing there first allows me also to get your feedback in real time.

Real time feedback loops

We're getting used to operate in streams, adding what we know to what others know and see, and taking snippets back to our own work (hopefully). This is the reason why people want streams, even though they may not necessarily show their reactions.

A good cross media integration includes some of these considerations -- helping people copy, share, remix, and making it easier to provide feedback in real time.

Your visible response rate may be a fraction of your attention pool, which is why the volume and methods of listening needs to be turned up very high (also, you need to know what you're listening for).

Learning tip: When I evaluate tools, I ask myself, would I hire this app/tool to do this job?

Do you use your presence in social networks to do that? You can listen with influence (done with the right intent).

Resources worth your time

Attention is more valuable than money. Why I choose very carefully what to recommend. When I compile a list of resources, it's because I have vetted each single one through use and your feedback.

Learning tip: when I read something, I process it as, what am I going to do with this (data, information, story, etc.)?

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Risk intelligence

Gerald Baron authored a book a few years ago Now is Too Late 2 still worth reading (this second edition is from 2006) for the many hands-on examples of real crisis response from personal experience. This is tangentially also a resource about influence. You want to exert the right kind in a crisis.

Which is why it's much better to be prepared to address issues, especially in the age of instant news.

For a sample post that illustrates his thinking, read about how to start nasty rumors, which seems to be a new turn recently. (and it impacts not only communication pros)

Learning tip: look at take aways from adjacent industries and useful practices, take as how would this show up in my line of work/business?

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How about you? Have you learned something or about a resource recently we should look into? Why?

Happy Friday.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

The phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message", meant that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived#.

[Do stop sending me those press releases already.]

Our outlook, attitudes, how we relate to the world are changed by the things with which we choose to surround ourselves. McLuhan maintained that all media are an extension of human faculty –- physical or mental.

Several years ago, in the (still) early days of blogging, we were talking about the semantic Web as the answer to content discovery and a bunch of other interesting possibilities like:

dealing with data

growth of networks

end of selling as pitches (see reference to no press releases)

opt-in email (two scoops of this one, please)

dealing with bandwidth (especially of the human kind)

The announcement by @ev that team Obvious has come up with a new Medium (that's the name of the platform) sparked interest.

Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab has done a fine job of bubbling up some questions and points about it. Mechanically, as he says, Medium has been described as “a cross between Tumblr and Pinterest.”

Another excellent observation from the article about the tension between individual publisher and organizations:

Personal publishing is like voting. In theory, it’s the very definition of empowerment. In reality, it’s an excellent way for your personal shout to be cancelled out by someone else’s shout.

On a very first blush, Medium slots authorship in second place -- a silver medal for the creator, a gold one for the topic. As @ev says in the official launch post:

Posting on Medium (not yet open to everyone) is elegant and easy, and you can do so without the burden of becoming a blogger or worrying about developing an audience. All posts are organized into “collections,” which are defined by a theme and a template.

Without the burden of making a commitment.

Which prompted me to ask: is Medium the message (itself)?

There is a reason why I stuck with this blog over the years. Because I see it as a creative outlet as in creating. Yes, I do have a Pinterest account for the fun stuff, compositions of beautiful spaces and things (at least to me).

The most intriguing part Benton addresses is at the very end. When he says, there will be new ways to structure content discovery that go beyond branding authorship and recommendation engines.

I don't know about you. I do read people, not content. Sure, discovery happens through writing. Then I follow the individual -- not because they are popular, because they are good (for me).

And yet, I thought about something else I wrote a long time ago: the messenger isn't the message. The messenger isn't the message, because the conduit never addresses a need. Message relevance still boils down to buyer, seller, and value proposition.

I'm curious: where do you see this one going?

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

"The complexity of the problems we face is growing bigger and bigger. And our ability to solve problems is changing... We have 40 watts of energy to work with and what we really respond to is that difference in that other person... We can be selectively strange to other people... Let's reach out to the strange... When we are together, creativity goes up."

Here's the video of a recent TEDxDesMoines with Mike. Up top, he asks three questions:

How many of you would you self-identify as strange?

How many of you would identify someone else as strange?

How many of you think that should people really knew us, the secret us, would put us in the strange category?

The TSA story is quite powerful.

Brain research says it -- taken alone, every one of us is a dim bulb. We each have about 40 watts of energy to work with in terms of brain power. Energy consumption and where we're going to spend our time and attention is always an issue for our brain.

I laughed out loud when he talked about 3M ticking people off by moving them on different teams where they knew nobody every so many years.

I'm familiar with that brand of strange. In middle school, we were graded on group work. Our contribution was weighed in the context of how we collaborated in conceptualizing, researching, writing, and presenting projects to the class.

It ticked me off because my perception was that the teacher didn't like me as she regularly put me in a group with peers who needed extra help. What I didn't understand back then and realized later in life, is that she did so because she could count on my strangeness.

I'm so grateful it happened. I would probably not be where I am today had I not learned to embrace strange, as Mike put it. The teacher put me in that context, she didn't make me do it (nobody makes you do anything you don't want to).

Go forth, experiment with your strangeness, what makes you different, close that distance with others, and get creative.

Every moment of every day we have the opportunity to close the gap on our promises with our executions. To be in the moment, in conversation to both make sense of things and receive feedback about what is appropriate.

Making sense of things is hard, especially as we're called to make decisions while we're moving.

The degree of difficulty with closing the gap goes up exponentially when we forget to be in the moment as we're doing what we (know) we need to do to get the job done. It is the value of your promise and the wisdom of the trade that earns your place in the market.

Whether we think we're right or wrong is not at issue in most situations. The weight of past decisions and experiences, stories we hold onto, assumptions we make, habits we've hired, etc. factor in as much as we let them.

We have plenty of communication and execution tools.

Mind the gap

There are intended as well as unintended consequences to our actions (or inactions). When we increase our situational awareness, we increase our probability we will be appropriate.

It's probably easiest to see this principle at work by looking at examples of mis-alignment.

"Your call is important to us"

This is a best practice line borrowed from customer support messaging, a variation of which is still wildly in use by HR departments. Many organizations are still working on their buy strategy and inside business model.

A symptom of this confusion is the standard your request has been prosecuted response when you actually do what the company asked you to do: apply for a job. Doesn't everyone know you don't get a job that way anymore?

Everyone but the organization requesting that candidates follow their process? If we agree it's broken, why continue with it?

A better question is how can we listen better to find the candidates we seek?

Go on, apply for a job with your own company. See for yourself what you get when you call your 800-number. Write down the three things that worked to connect you with a top notch candidate. How can you look at your process to get to more of those?

"Give us your strategy for free"

This is an issue agencies need to confront quite often. The standoff is a red herring, a symptom of a deeper misalignment.

Were you having a honest conversation about the issues, it would look much different. Take a look at some of the answers brand marketers have given and you will find some useful tidbits:

we would prefer to work more closely with the makers -- are things getting lost in translation?

we need help on understanding the complexity of our macro business situation -- is the agency approach so downstream that it's become too tactical?

we want a partner to help us coordinate and connect the dots -- are you able to take the lead and work alongside a fairly layered organization?

Many of these comments speak to doing habits -- operational side execution issues.

Do you expect your agency to wow you and underbid other agencies in a competitive pitch? Then why are you surprised when that's exactly what you get? How much information about your business do you share? Or is it how little?

"I'll never be able to do that"

Saving the best example for last. When our behaviors -- individually and collectively -- get in the way of us doing what we do and get better at it by doing it.

Which is why blacksmiths are better at startups than you. You've got to bang the iron to get the piece done, there's no way around that. Mastery is achieved by doing, sometimes a lot, sometimes many years before you get it done, not by doing just a little.

Most definitely not by talking about it, or having read about it. Amy Hoy says the students find themselves achieving extraordinary things… just as soon as they decide to get over their crap.

That's pretty consistent with the data points from every success story.

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Making sense of things is hard. Harder yet when you are not in a hands-on type situation. Experiencing what you inflict on others counts toward that.

Contrary to what you may be lead to believe, life is not a huge popularity contest. Not even close.

Life is one big comprehension test and you may change your stance enough to cut to the chase and get to work on closing that gap between saying and doing. Business is a reality engine. Corporations are mechanisms to make and keep collective promises.

It's been my focus in the last couple of years, and the reason why I've chosen the path I'm currently on.

Besides being wicked smart, a corporate legal counsel, a philosopher, and a good person, Peter is quite the spirited conversationalist -- we've known each other for 12 years. Here are some of his thoughts on directorship.

The description for the proposed topic:

Uploading Humanism with Commerce

Transactions are the highest form of preference. It is the value of your promise and the wisdom of the trade that earns your place in the market.

The reason why conversation is a fundamental part of commerce is that (a) meaning must be negotiated – none of the elements (e.g., assets, value proposition, markets, territory, channels, customers, etc.) come with labels or care instructions and (b) we need feedback to know how to be appropriate i.e. to put the pieces together in the way that creates the most value. While relationships take time to set, listening and negotiating get you closer to the money.

Humanism is the active agent in increasing the options, choices, and possibilities of commerce.

Questions Answered

Why make the promise and what limits does it place on future promises?

How will the promise be kept and what is the risk/probability if not kept (on both sides of the trade)?

How do you use conversation to identify and create the most value?

How do you run brand scenarios (look at fresh ways to trade better promises and assets on the buy side, sell side, and inside the business)?

What assumptions are made and is the risk priced/mitigated?

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I would be honored to share the stage with Peter, and you can help make it possible (he's based in Melbourne, Australia), by voting here.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.

Then there's the talk about the successful promotion of the stuff other people make.

There isn't nearly as much conversation about making something worth promoting. (promotion of the writing you do about selling the stuff you have doesn't count).

Then consider: where are your expectations? What does making it big mean to you?

Put specific edges on them, so you can work it.

Talking about promotion is much more exciting than working on your product.

The experience happens close to the product. That's where differentiation meets value proposition -- people come to you because you are the only one who meets certain criteria. They may even talk about their experience to everyone they know if you give them the opportunity to fill in their details and complete the story.

Does this story lead somewhere worth my time?

That's where business increases its relevance. It's where your relevance is higher, too.

I used to write much more about communication challenges and public relations in the early days of this blog.

When the number of inbound inquiries to do PR (the write the press release and spam the hell out of everyone kind of requests) reached critical level, I hit the "escape" button.

I'm not a PR person, even though I can play one in a pinch. You won't like the way I play it. My first question in business dealings is usually: "is this true"?

And we'll leave it there, because there are plenty of solid and experienced professionals who practice and advance the public relations profession the way it should be -- and not just in the myopic, media-centered, order-taking, propaganda-driven press release churn. Would you like fries with that?

It is undeniable that digital media and social technologies have brought about a sea of change for us all.

Media companies have seen competition and disruption from new entrants they were not even considering a short few years ago. They were by and large dragged online kicking and screaming -- and often crying, too due to the loss of ad dollars from their old model.

The press tribe didn't see content itself as a product until the model was applied successfully by digital native publications. They did not catch on until recently (and some will say not even now) that it is a completely different way to understand what people think and worry about, what they want to say and do.

They migrated without moving in.

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Corporations found themselves in a similar situation with regard to message control. They now need more hands-on support due to the potential (and very real) upside of direct relationships with a greater number of publishers among their stakeholders.

Why wait to have an issue to anticipate, analyze and interpret public opinion, for example?

Many are still getting caught unprepared.

On the bright side, think of the potential to conduct and evaluate programs of action and communication to achieve the informed public understanding necessary to the success of your organization’s purpose.

Today you can do that on an ongoing basis.

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Business relationships are increasingly public, whether you make them so or not. There is probably more content about your products and services online than there ever was.

The digital footprint of your organizations and a permanent record of public relationships with your business become the information people find and use.

Understanding why people are saying what they are saying and figuring out how to help them be better informed about your business should be part of PR practitioners' role.

Great communicators are able to handle complexity through a combination of learning agility -- you do need to learn the business you're in to be most effective -- and ability to help the business scope and accept new challenges, so they can trade better.

By delivering on its promises, a business gains the ability to make better ones and in the process develop relationships, gain loyalty, build trust, and get more flow dollars for their brand.

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Every now and then someone asks me about communicating more effectively in digital media. So I wanted to bring up some of the older posts I wrote about it.

We're just scratching the surface on connecting the stream with action. We haven't done many of the things we talk about just yet, even as the market is fairly mature in terms of tools available for the choosing.

It was John Naisbitt (ref: Megatrends) who said that each innovation in technology, to be successful, must be coupled with a compensatory human response.

Relationships still take time to set.

It's time to upload humanism.

I propose uploading humanism through commerce. This is the title of a dual session I submitted for consideration at SxSWi 2013 (voting starts tomorrow).

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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.